I grew up watching and emulating my dad, so I too was never vulnerable. Didn't believe in it, thought it was something dumb that I shouldn't be doing. And that's how I lived my entire adult life. Up until a few years ago when I had a series of panic attacks, which I later found out came about because I was writing a book on vulnerability when I myself didn't believe in vulnerability.
And welcome back everyone to another episode of Geekscissors and Googleization. Thank you for being part of Googleization Nation. I'm Iberwolf. And I'm Jason Cochran.
If you think this is just another podcast, think again. We're the voice of the most important conversations on the future. We're confronting business leaders and people today. Our goal is to bring you ways to reimagine tomorrow and explore the ever-changing convergence of business technology and people.
Today on our episode, we're going to confront an issue that weighs heavy on the minds of millions of people, the threat of AI eliminating jobs. But we're not going to be talking specifically about the jobs or AI, but let me explain. Our guest today is a Geekscissors and Googleization alumni. Jacob Morgan is a best-selling author, highly respected speaker, and talks about creating great leaders, engaging employees, and building future ready organizations.
But Jacob has a brand new book. He just came out last week, October 3rd, and it's titled Leading with Vulnerability, Unlock Your Greatest Superpower to Transform Yourself, Your Team, and Your Organization. Jason and I had the privilege of receiving a pre-publication copy. And I've got to tell you that Jacob's personal journey with vulnerability is something that many people, including myself and probably a lot of listeners, can relate to.
But what struck me most wasn't necessarily the context of why Jacob researched and wrote the book. While he was focused on the intersection of vulnerability and leadership, I was excited by how vulnerability seems to reframe the conversation we've been having lately about AI and job. Most of the time, we capture people's response to AI as anger or fear on one end of the spectrum compared to fascination on the other. Of course, people like Jason and myself, as well as many of our guests and connections, hanging around this HR tech space, fall into the fascination category.
But I suspect we're really in the minority, probably a very small minority. That means the rest of the population might be fearful, maybe even angry, look no further than the recent screenwriter strike. But Jacob introduced a completely new shade of gray for me, vulnerability. After reading the book, it's my belief that people are not necessarily afraid of AI taking their jobs, nor are they angry.
Of course, there's some people are, but based on the conversations I've had since reading the book, including in my class yesterday, that my undergrad class that I've mentioned a few times about innovation and entrepreneurship, most people admitted to feeling vulnerable. They had a thought of it that way. And they just aren't sure what to do about the future work, how fast things are changing. And that uncertainty creates the fear, but it's not the fear of AI.
It's their vulnerability. That's the problem. So vulnerability is often construed as a weakness. So today, we're going to reframe that a bit and think about vulnerability as a superpower and leading with vulnerability of the book, in my opinion, is a real game changer, not just with leaders, but with every human being, confronting a future, field, disruptive, transformative space.
And it's compounded by complexity and acceleration of change. So can't wait to get Jacob here. He'll be joining us in just a few minutes. But first, it's time for our Perfect Labor Center segment, where we focus each week on a disruptive, surprising, worrisome trend that we believe you should know.
And we're going to feature some of Jason's research from his book. He asked participants if vulnerability was seen as a leadership strength and not a weakness. Here's the thing, only 11% of respondents agreed and 34% replied they were uncertain. In fact, only 16% of the respondents said their leaders displayed qualities of leading with vulnerability.
I also did a little bit more research and looked into the 2023 Global Leadership Forecast and revealed that like we talked about the last few weeks, there's a significant lack of trust with leadership. Only 46% of leaders report that they fully trust their direct manager to do what's right and even more troubling, fewer than one in three trust senior leaders within the organization. How he's tie in, it's pretty difficult to lead with vulnerability when executives don't trust their employees and employees don't trust their leaders. Hey, everyone, it looks like Jason is having a little bit of technical difficulty with his internet.
So we're going to just jump in and bring on Jacob. I'm really excited to hear more about Jacob's journey and his inspiration for writing book, Leading with Vulnerability and viewing it through the lens of the workplace and the future of work. So here's a little bit about Jacob. Morgan, if you're not familiar with him or you haven't listened to him on his prior visit to Geeks Keezus and Googleization, Jacob's a best-selling author of five books, including the most recent that was just published last week, Leading with Vulnerability, Unlocked, Your Greatest Superpower to Transform Yourself, Your Team and Your Organization.
It can be found at leadwithvulnerability.com. He's also a speaker and professionally trained futurist whose work has been endorsed by CEOs of Best Buy, MasterCard, Unilever, KPMG, Nestle, Cisco and best-selling authors like Adam Grant, Bill Robbins, Patrick Lencioni, and Amy Edmondson. You can learn more about Jacob as his personal site, thefuturorganization.com, where you can get access to his content. A great, great newsletter.
You can go to greatleadership.substack.com. So let's give a warm Googleization Nation welcome to today's guest, Jacob Morgan. Hopefully you're not having the same level of difficulty then. No, no, everything's working on my end, so I'll get it.
I apologize to everyone. So welcome. Welcome back to the show. As I said earlier, the book really profoundly struck me as I was reading the story.
It was quite a journey. Obviously, your introduction and your first chapter really laid out some real personal concerns, some thoughts, some process that you were going through the last few years. I heard the story over and over again, and we came from similar backgrounds and similar parents and many, I'm sure many of those parents have had, or many of our listeners have had that with vulnerabilities and weakness. But before we dive into that topic, let's talk a little bit about the journey.
Where you started, why this book was so important for you? Yeah, the journey came about it from two different places. One was on the business side and one was on the personal side. The personal side came about because I came from a Georgia immigrant parents from the former USSR and growing up, my dad always taught me not to be vulnerable, not to show weakness or emotion of any kind.
And that's just always important to be tough and strong. My mom tried to model emotional vulnerability and openness, but as a young boy, naturally I grew up watching and emulating my dad. So I too was never vulnerable. I didn't believe in it.
I thought it was something dumb that I shouldn't be doing. And that's how I lived my entire adult life. Up until a few years ago, when I had a series of panic attacks, which I later found out came about because I was writing a book on vulnerability when I myself didn't believe in vulnerability. And so that kind of conflict came out physically and emotionally.
On the business side, it came about because in previous books that I've written, I've heard leaders talk about vulnerability quite a bit, but they talk about it in a very conflicting way in the sense that they understood why it was important, but there were two challenges that they were faced with. One of them is that on the one hand, their employees were telling them that they should be confident and strong and visionary leaders. And on the other hand, employees were saying, we want you to be able to talk about your feelings and emotions and challenges. And so leaders were basically trying to figure out which one, which leader do you want?
Do you want the leader who's strong and competent and confident or do you want the leader who's going to be talking about challenges and failures and weaknesses and struggles? The second challenge that became that these leaders knew, obviously we all know what vulnerability is. We all know what it means to feel vulnerable. We've all felt vulnerable.
But a lot of leaders were trying to grapple with the fact that vulnerability in your personal life is not the same as it is inside of your organization because inside of your company at work, you have a different dynamic. You have a hierarchy, you have a boss, you have deadlines, projects, you have money, you have customers. And so vulnerability at work is not the same as it is in your personal life. And similarly, vulnerability for a leader is not the same as it is for everybody else, because you are in a position of power and influence where you are responsible for dollars and cents and when you're responsible for the lives of other people that you work with.
And so I really wanted to write a book which explored vulnerability from a work perspective and specifically vulnerability from a current or aspiring leader perspective. And that's why I interviewed the 100 CEOs and surveyed the 14,000 employees. So Jacob, with that in mind, by the way, Googleization Nation is good to finally be with you. Sorry for the technical snafus there.
Talk about being vulnerable. Metro, I'll be contacting you later. But Jacob, we all have kind of like models in our head when there's things that we aspire to, you opened up and you were vulnerable in writing this book on vulnerability in a workplace. I'm curious.
As you were writing, were there certain people that came to mind that were models of vulnerability in the workplace that you looked up to, that you were aspiring toward in this journey? I mean, there were a few. And by the way, I should preface that there's a difference between vulnerability versus leading with vulnerability that I set aside in the book. And one of the things I talk about in the book is not to be vulnerable, but to lead with vulnerability.
So the difference is that vulnerability is about exposing a gap that you have. It could be an emotional gap. It could be a gap in understanding. It could be a gap in competence.
But vulnerability based on the dictionary definition is you expose yourself to the potential of emotional or physical harm. But for most people in the business world, it's not physical harm. It's emotional harm. So what does that actually mean?
It means you might say or do something where somebody can take what you do or say and use it against you. Maybe you're part of a team and you tell one of your peers, he had never done this before and a little bit nervous. And the peer on your team then takes that information to your boss and says, why is Jacob on this team? He just told me he's never done that before.
And then I get moved off the team. So I say, where I do something, it puts me in a potentially harmful situation. Bernie Brown talks about vulnerability as the feeling that you get when you're confronted with risk, uncertainty or emotional exposure, which again, very relevant to the workplace. But in terms of a team and a work dynamic, it's usually about doing or saying something where somebody else can use what you say or do against you.
So what I talk about in the book is not just to expose the gaps that you have, but to expose the gaps that you have and then demonstrate what you're trying to do to close those gaps. That's the difference between being vulnerable versus leading with vulnerability. So a simple example might be instead of saying, I made a mistake, you say, I made a mistake, here's what I learned, here's what I'm going to do in the future to make sure that mistake doesn't happen again. So I'm vulnerable, but then I'm also adding a leadership piece.
I'm demonstrating what I'm trying to do to close the gap. And too often inside of our organizations, we focus on the gap and not what we're trying to do to close the gap. We assume that other people are going to close the gap, right? We go and we say, I need help.
I'm sorry, I made a mistake. I'm not feeling well. I'm going through a hard time. And while some of those are, you know, you should feel, of course, safe to talk about those things, but at the same time in a work dynamic, the people around you also want to know, well, what are you doing to take care of yourself?
What did you do based on the mistake that you learned? What are you going to do to help yourself in the future? We want to see that you are demonstrating to close that gap yourself, not just that you're throwing this gap to somebody else and say, you figure it out. And that I think is if people can get into that mindset, they will be more successful in their careers, their teams will be more successful and they'll be able to have a significantly much more positive impact than everyone around them.
So Jacob, what you just shared there around leading with vulnerability and how that's different from just being vulnerable, some of the things you just shared also triggered for me, psychological safety. Can you share with us? Are there some relationships? How do they correlate between leading with vulnerability and psychological safety?
Yeah, Amy Emminson was actually one of the people that I interviewed for my book, along with several other researchers and psychologists and professors and experts in various fields. And yeah, psychological safety is important aspect of this, right? Because if you don't feel safe, you will not be vulnerable. And so one of the ways that you get psychological safety is you lead by example.
As a leader, you don't go to your employees and tell them, you be vulnerable, I won't. As a leader, if you want other people to lead with vulnerability, you have to do it too, which means as a leader, you need to start being okay talking about your mistakes and failures and challenges and struggles and what you're trying to do to close that gap. Because if other people speak up and they're going to try to be vulnerable with you and you just punish them for it, obviously that's not an environment where psychological safety exists and it's not an environment where anybody's going to be comfortable even talking about their gaps. And when you don't talk about gaps, you don't have learning and growth and innovation, you don't have productivity, you don't have a lot of these things.
So being able to talk about the areas that you're struggling or being able to talk about the areas where you have gaps is crucial. But again, you need to have the psychological safety to do that, but you yourself also need to demonstrate what you're trying to do to close those gaps yourself. And so there's a very obviously strong relationship between psychological safety and leading with vulnerability. One of the things is we're just sharing that story and this came out through the book as well.
Obviously it takes courage or confidence that makes it both to be able to do that. So you need the support of people around you, you need support if it's at work, certainly if you're co-workers and management, the psychological safety that we just talked about. But individually, I mean for people to open up, to embrace the fact that growth is a journey that people or human beings and we're going to screw up. You've obviously been successful, you've spoken to how many people.
But there's a large percentage of population that has really confounded and just seems to lack the confidence, it's not even the courage to do that, but the confidence to even open up about this. Yeah. Yeah. So the number one reason again, we surveyed 14,000 employees in partnership with DDI.
We asked them, what's the number one reason why you're not comfortable being vulnerable at work? And the number one reason was because we don't want to be perceived as being weak or incompetent. So how do you avoid being perceived as being weak or incompetent? You demonstrate your competence.
Obviously, if you just show up at work every day talking about the gaps that you have, you are going to create a perception in the eyes of those around you that you have a lot of gaps, that you have a lot of issues, that you have a lot of areas that you're struggling with, a lot of things that you don't know how to do, but at the same time you're not demonstrating that you're trying to solve the problem. And so everyone around you is just going to look at you and say, what's going on here? It seems like maybe this isn't a good fit. So if you want to change that perception that other people have of you, when you're being vulnerable, then demonstrate the competence.
Don't just talk about the mistakes. Don't just tell people that you need help. Demonstrate what you're trying to do to close the gap. And by demonstrating that you are trying to become stronger, that you're trying to become more competent, you change the perception in the eyes of those around you.
And we see this time and time again in a lot of different areas. For example, think about when a new employee gets promoted into a leadership role for the first time. There's a couple of ways that they can approach it, right? Let's say they're meeting their team and they have to give a little, you know, five minutes.
I just got promoted, talk about what you're going to do with the team. And oftentimes first time leaders will say, I'm excited to be leading this team. I've never done this before, but I know I'm confident that I can have a great impact and with things of that nature. And on the surface, it doesn't sound like that's a terrible thing to say, but what would be far more effective is if you could sprinkle in the leadership in there and say, I'm a first time leader.
I've never done this before, but to make sure that I'm going to be the best leader that you had, I'm going to be mentored by one of the other leaders at this company. I have an executive coach who I'm going to be meeting with once a week. Here are three leadership books that I'm reading. I encourage you to follow along with me as well.
And by the way, my door is going to be open to any feedback that you want to share with me. And so not only have I been vulnerable and told you that, hey, I know it's my first time and I know that I might not get things right, but here's what I'm trying to do to make sure that I can be a good leader and I'm doing these things to close that gap. And that way, when you share, when you are vulnerable, you, again, you don't need to worry as much about the being a week or incompetent because you're demonstrating the strength and the competence there. We just forget to do that.
We're just very good at the first part and we forget about the second part. One of the things that I talk a lot about and even built the program around it is worth mindset. One of the things that I talk about now is that there are people that have been in the workforce for 15, 20, 25 years and when we introduced that and many of those are the people that are feeling most threatened or fearful about AI is taking my job. And one is that there was a mindset of that if you work hard, you stay focused, you get experience, you get your degrees, you do all these things that life, you'll just have enough in you to roll out the retirement.
So I can't tell you how many I heard it yesterday. Don't you said, I'm just hanging in there. I only have 12 more years to retirement. Well, that worked in the past.
12 more years of retirement in 1950 was easy street. Yeah. Today, if you said, hey, I only got three more years of retirement, you don't know if you're safe. So people are absolutely feeling this vulnerability going around there.
But I try to trace a lot of it back to the fixed mindset that if you have the credentials, you build your resume, you show up every day, that's enough and all of a sudden the band A got ripped off. Yeah. Absolutely not true. No, no, I mean, you got to have both of those things, right?
Vulnerability is how you connect with people and competence is demonstrating that you're good at your job. You're only good at connecting with people and people will view you. So in other words, if you're only vulnerable, people will be used being incompetent. And if you're only competent, people will view you as being a robot, right?
You're good at your job, but you don't connect with people. You're going to just be viewed as the stereotypical manager from office space. So you do need to be good at connecting with people, but you also need to be good at your job. And that's really the focus of the book and the research is don't forget about both of those elements.
Don't just focus on one. Jacob, was there something that totally surprised you in the findings from the CE? Oh, we lost in there for a second. Yeah, we're getting like every other word from you, Jason, but I know what your question was.
Was there something that really shocked you when you heard from surprise you from the CEOs, some people that you might really respect it? Well, still respect, maybe respect it more. Is there something that you shared? But were there any general themes that came out that really surprised you?
Yeah, there were a lot. I mean, one of them was the fact that so many leaders have shared that vulnerability at some point was used against them and they didn't always have good experiences with it. And so I have lots of stories in the book about that. A second is how uncomfortable vulnerability is for a lot of leaders.
As far as even the physical manifestations, what it does to your body of CEOs of shared that they've had panic attacks, they've gotten stressed out, they get butterflies and their stomach, their heart beat goes up. So being vulnerable doesn't correlate with a positive happy feeling. And so being able to hear that some of the top executives of companies around the world go through this, I thought was very interesting. And just hearing about the challenges that a lot of leaders are having with this was very surprising to me, knowing that a lot of executives out there believe in vulnerability and understand the value, but just unsure of how to implement it and bring it into a workplace setting.
And so I feel like it's kind of at this tipping point where a lot of people want to do these things inside their company, but they just need a little bit of guidance and a framework on how to bring it to life at work. And so my hope is that that's what the book will do. There's a lot that's been in the media recently and you never really heard about this in the past as much, but in Posta syndrome. And I'm wondering if this is, you know, chicken or the egg, does the vulnerability, you know, does the lack of vulnerability create this imposter syndrome or does the imposter syndrome eventually create the vulnerability?
May not matter. But were you seeing that, were you hearing that throughout there? It sounds like some of these, what you just shared inferred that was real. Yeah, I mean, imposter syndrome, I think it's probably a separate thing, probably related, but imposter syndrome is basically the idea that you don't belong, you don't deserve, you don't fit in, you know, you don't, if you're a leader, you shouldn't be a leader, right?
If you don't deserve that, you're not good enough. And yeah, a lot of leaders that I also interviewed mentioned that they struggle with that too. Related vulnerability, but I think leading with vulnerability is a separate thing, but oftentimes it can correlate to and be associated with imposter syndrome too, because having imposter syndrome makes you feel vulnerable. Having imposter syndrome makes you feel like, you know, it gives you that uncomfortable feeling and being able to talk about that imposter syndrome is also a very vulnerable thing where a leader can open up and say, I've gone through that, I know what that feels like.
So very, very much, I think in the same kept there. Yeah, I mean, it's absolutely complex because as you shared, you know, what your background was and a lot of people, you know, it was not only ethnic, if you grew up in a military family, you didn't, you know, basically people didn't show their weaknesses. And yet we've been talking to a lot of military people recently, we have military backgrounds, you know, certainly, a lot of the money selling in this work and other people is, you know, you find out that that in betting a lot of the military is now embedding this into their, into their training. Yeah.
And so, you know, I think that's a very important thing to do with the, I mean, when you look at the PTSD, we talked about that with, with Gabriela Cowerman, just a few weeks ago, who, who wrote the book with Marty Sullivan, you know, a lot of that was, you know, how do you change the leaders to recognize that that you just can't let that, you know, go, unattended. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's an important element that I think needs to be talked about inside of organizations, not just from the vulnerability side, but also from the competent side too. So, I think having those conversations is crucial inside of companies.
Okay. We were going to take a short break. We were right at the bottom, but we're right at that perfect point. So, you know, you identify eight attributes or eight traits of vulnerability.
And I think that's where I'd like to, where we should really start to focus on because what are, what are the traits or what are the abilities that people can develop to be able to move forward? And, you know, that's the good news. I mean, you can develop this. You can learn as you said that leading with vulnerability is part vulnerability, part confidence.
And you have an equation, you have a formula for that. So when we come back, we're going to talk about your equation, we're going to talk about the eight traits, the eight attributes of vulnerable leaders. We are talking about, we are talking with, if you haven't figured out, Jake Morgan. He's the author of the brand new book, Leading with Vulnerability.
But the, you can get this up on Amazon. Anyplace, Book Soul Barnes and Noble, you know, up to the website, which is scrolling along at the bottom as well, lead with vulnerability.com, or you can actually capture it on his website, thefuturorganization.com. We will be right back. We're going to take a really quick break here and hear from our sponsor and stay tuned.
We're going to come back talking about the eight attributes. I have valuable leaders and valuable leaders. And we're also going to talk about the equation. Are your employees feeling stuck and just showing up for a paycheck?
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Visit AQ Plus Mindset.com or call 484-373-4300. Hey, welcome back everyone to GeekSkeezers and Globalization. I'm here today with our friend and GeekSkeezers and Globalization alumni, Jacob Morgan. He's got a brand new book out leading with vulnerability.
And I love this topic. I love this topic. As I mentioned earlier in the show, I mentioned it again. It is a real game changer.
You can pick the book up leading with vulnerability at your favorite bookstore. I don't believe it's audio yet, but I know you can get a Kindle and part and. Audio is coming. I just finished recording it.
That's good news. So Jacob, when we left off, we were talking about some of the traits. But before then, you also developed an equation. So let's talk about that and then lead into what are the eight attributes of a vulnerable leader and some of the tips of what companies and individuals can do to help develop that.
Yeah, the vulnerable leader equation is pretty much what we've been talking about. It's leadership plus vulnerability equals leading with vulnerability. Competence plus connection equals leading with vulnerability. And it's the foundation for the book.
It's what the whole thing is based on and built on top of. It's just that fundamental principle where when you know that vulnerability is going to be present and you need to be vulnerable, try to add leadership to it. And when you know that leadership is going to be present, when it makes sense, try to bring that connection, the vulnerability to the equation. In ideally, leaders can do a better job of being able to bring them both of those together and the interactions that they have with their teams and with their employees.
So with the equation and this question, this thought just popped into my head. When you went into this and you started interviewing people and I know this was just the research and to find out and somewhat a combination of self discovery, but open up a rabbit hole where it was this what you expected? I mean, is this the direction you thought it would go or did that equation that eventually came out of this completely shocking? It was like, wow, I never put these two into together.
No, it actually made a lot of sense because in my previous book, The Future Leader, when I was also interviewing a lot of executives, some of these themes started coming up a lot as well. So no, I mean, it very much went in the direction that I thought it was going to go. I didn't know what those pieces would be, but even in a previous book when I wrote a book on employee experience, I had the employee experience equation. So I'm a big fan of taking more complex concepts and trying to distill them into something simple.
So in this case, the theme of leading with vulnerability is just that leadership plus vulnerability. No surprises there. I think it's pretty straightforward. It makes a lot of sense.
Yeah, as you say that, we work a lot with helping people articulate your purpose, which is crazy because most people, when you ask a question, something like that, it's like, what's your purpose? Well, I want to get a good job. I want to take care of my family, but it's all the intellectual parts of that, but it's not the heart of why people does something, but we work with assignment cynic. Well, I'm sure you're familiar with it.
Go in circle. And there's nine wise, but just as you shared that up, my bet is that one of your wise is simplified, either makes sense, simplify or clarify. We're all three. Yeah.
So I'm always challenging finding better ways to challenge this status quo. Let's go back to some of the attributes work, because I want to make sure that we have time and we get to this, because this is really where it's going to help individuals and organizations change and create a loud vulnerability and the lead with vulnerability that happens. So kind of walk us through some of these eight traits attributes. Sure.
I can give you maybe a sentence on each one. So there are three four leadership and five for vulnerability. And the way that I encourage people to think about this is kind of like if you've ever seen the Avengers, the whole concept is you bring together these infinity stones and then when they are brought together, they unleash this tremendous power or potential. And that's what these attributes are.
So when you bring these eight attributes together, they unleash this tremendous potential, this power that you as a leader can bring forward, it allows you to lead with vulnerability. So again, three four leadership, five for vulnerability. For leadership, the first one, we talked about quite a bit competence, being good at your job. Number two is self-confidence.
And that's the idea of believing in yourself, because if you don't believe in you, why what other people believe in you? What is motivation and motivation is having the drive to take action and to improve, having the drive to do something, because it's one thing to talk about it, it's another thing to do it. So those are the three four leadership competence, motivation and self-confidence. Next, we have the five for vulnerability, which are self-awareness.
So basically understanding your thoughts, behaviors and actions and how other people perceive you. And we have self-compassion, which is how you talk to yourself. Do you have a positive internal dialogue or negative internal dialogue? I used to have very much a negative internal dialogue.
Next is empathy, being able to see things from other people's perspective, understand their point of view where they're coming from. Then we have authenticity, which is about being a single version of you, where people understand your values, what you care about, what's important to you. And lastly, we have integrity, which is being a moral anonymous person, having your North Star, your true North. And those are the five elements of vulnerability.
So if you can do all eight of these things and bring together all eight of those things, you'll be able to lead with vulnerability. It's amazing. And again, you've had extensive research, how many CEOs you've interviewed for this book and you've been buying, so probably two, three, four hundred CEOs and then working thousand people in the DDI survey. That's significant.
A lot of people write books based on 300. In an interview with 100 people or 300 people. Yeah, I like to bring in qualitative and quantitative data to a lot of things that I do. But it's amazing that the themes, it always seems to come back to things that we talked about for 30, 40 years.
Daniel Bowman, 30 years ago, talking about emotional intelligence, it starts with self-awareness. We talk about confidence. We talk about integrity. This sounds like the poster wall when you go into an organization.
You say, what are their values? And they list all the values, but they don't always walk and talk. You put them together. Here's the formula.
Here's the attributes and tremendous reinforcement. And I'm going to reinforce what you just shared. Those aren't just traits. This isn't like, well, I'm just a frontline worker or I don't have any people underneath me.
We're all vulnerable right now in leading up to this future work. We're living in this age of vucca, volatile and certain complex and ambiguous. If it's not a technological event that's disruptive, if it's not politics, living in the US, if it's not politics, it's war. I mean, it's just think every day there is some other event that creates some level of uncertainty and complexity and ambiguity and volatility.
Every human being on this planet is experiencing levels of change. Even for the people who have all eight of your attributes, if they're not feeling somewhat vulnerable at this point and recognize that they need to adapt and change and grow, but they may not know exactly what their next step is and be able to admit that. It's somewhat scary when people think that they have the answers. You can't become a better version of yourself without being able to talk about and expose the gaps that you have and we all have those gaps.
Yeah, I'm going to speak a couple of times next week. You speak all the time. We're both doing interviews all the time. It's almost that tag of expert.
Well, you're the expert and you're recognized. It doesn't mean I have all the answers. It became a long time to admit that I don't know. Here's my best shot.
Here's what I see. Here's what I heard. Here's how I put it together. I can tell you, if I was in this position 30, 40 years ago, even 20 years ago, there are certain things that I would not admit that I was uncomfortable with just because it would have shown that weakness.
And at that point, maybe we could get away with it, but in this day and age, it's incredibly tough. I got to ask this question because I've been fortunate enough to either have the confidence and when I didn't have the confidence, I said rather than myself, I said rather than myself with people who would support me. But there's a lot of people that are listening to this and reading your book that it all sounds good. It sounds right.
Yes, I want to do that. I want to. But they're not surrounded by or working with people who feel it's wise to be vulnerable. What's your advice to them, other than find a group of friends, to her family?
Well, so again, it's not just about being vulnerable, but it's about demonstrating what you're trying to do to close the gap. But obviously, if you've been talking about the gaps that you have, let alone what you're doing to close them is viewed as unacceptable as you to something that you shouldn't do, then you probably need to ask yourself if that's the type of a company that you want to be a part of and if that's the type of leader that you want to work for. And even if you can't even speak up to talk about those things to begin with, chances are, you're probably not very happy at the company. You're not engaged in the work that you're doing and you should be trying to ask yourself if that's really where you want to be working.
And I would hope the answer to that is no and that you would take steps to get the heck out of there and find something that is worthy of your talents and capabilities. Yeah, which goes back full circle to some of the attributes that we're talking about in order to do that. You need to be self-aware. You need to have self-confidence.
So it's, again, I mean, you basically laid out a playbook, whether it's vulnerability or the confidence that you need to work on, you basically laid it out. Is there a place that you would recommend that leaders or anybody starts? What was there, did you sense that there was a prioritization between those eight? So it's not a prioritization between those eight, but a good starting point is what I call building your vulnerability mountain.
And that means identifying what's at the base camp of the mountain for you and what's something that you can do tomorrow or the next day or today even better. And then what's sort of the scary thing that's at the top of the peak of that mountain for you. And then day by day and week by week and month by month, you take steps to go from base camp to getting to the peak of the mountain. So what is something simple that you can do tomorrow and what's the scary thing for you that you can't imagine doing?
And each day you try to do something a little to go from where you are to where you can go at the top. And I think that's probably the best way to learn how to lead with vulnerability. And every day you do something a little bit different. Wonderful.
We're basically coming toward the end here. But one of the questions we've learned, one of my favorite questions I asked all our guests because we learned a lot since this becomes this part of the show. What was something that you wanted us to ask, but we didn't? What should we have asked you, but we didn't?
You know, I think we actually covered a lot of the high level stuff there. I think you covered all the main questions. Well, that makes me feel good. Usually there's, you know, that's the vulnerability part.
It's like darn, why didn't I ask that question? Or are they said we should ask that question and we forgot about it. But thank you. Appreciate that.
So we're going to move to our last segment before we let you go here. We call this our lightning round. And this is the fun part where we allow our listeners to learn a little bit more with the Jacob Morgan is behind the scenes. Although if you read the book, you're going to learn a lot about Jacob.
But some other things that weren't in the book. So let's start out with one of our favorite questions is what's your favorite song or favorite band or what type of music do you like to listen to? I listened to a lot of electronic music, a lot of house music while I'm working. But I did just go see Jethro Tal with my dad.
So I've listened to a lot of Jethro Tal songs lately. It's amazing that he's still around Ian Anderson, right? Yeah, I actually saw this will age me, but I saw back that would have been almost 50 years ago. Jethro Tal on Halloween night.
It was one of the strangest concerts I've ever seen. The Philadelphia at the old spectrum. I just opened and yeah, it was very strange, but very, very good. Also I think that's the first we've ever had Jethro Tal.
So a unique music, very talented guy. So I envy you a little bit. We're actually going next week, we're going to see Queen with Adam Lambert. Oh, that should be interesting.
Yeah, so that should be that should be fun. Yeah, I think it was a birthday gift, but I guess my wife, I can't remember. Yeah, exactly. How that goes without the Freddie Mercury either.
Yeah, I got to tell you, Adam Lambert's from the scenes that we've seen, it's pretty tough to tell. He's pretty good. Yeah, if there was someone you can meet, I suspect I know where this was going to go. Either go back in history or even somebody that's living right now.
If there was an opportunity to interview someone, who might it be? Probably my great, great grandparents. Some ancestors on my dad's side. Yeah, it doesn't.
I suspect that that's where it was going to be, but you just never know. And this is almost a layup on this one. If you had a superpower, what would it be? Yeah, I guess the layup would be leading with vulnerability.
So let's see if I can do a different one there. I mean, I'm working on the leading with the vulnerability side. Probably another superpower would be just a perfect decision-making abilities. We're getting there.
Tell the word. I guess perfect lies in the beholder. Yeah, beholder. You're a perfect decision.
It may not be so perfect for somebody else, right? Exactly. It may not be a global perfect decision, but excellent. Well, Jacob, it's been absolutely a blast, Avonya.
It's so good to talk to you again, especially the journey. And I keep saying this, but the book really is great. I encourage not just leaders and managers. I think this is a book for our time, the future of work, because we all need to take that self-leadership and our own destiny.
And times are going to be both talented and complex and ambiguous for the near future, if not forever, going forward. And so I congratulate on the book, incredible research, well-written. And I will make sure, as you ask me, I will get that review in if I didn't just do it. Oh, yeah, yeah.
If we can go to LeadWithVulnerability.com to learn more about the book and grab a copy for themselves if they want, and it's also on Amazon and pretty much everywhere you can find a book. Yeah, we'll put it up there, and we'll do one more blast on the cover here. So you can pick that up. The best way is to, again, touch with you, I guess, is Lead With Vulnerability or your website, which is...
Yeah, Lead With Vulnerability is the book. My website is thefutureorganization.com. And links to all the social stuff and everything is on that website. Perfect.
Well, thanks, Jacob. We'll give you back your day here. We'll take that off. Appreciate it being here.
I know you got incredibly busy schedule, especially with the book just coming out. But thank you for taking the time. Thanks for having me. Okay.
We apologize for Jason. It looks like he bowed out. He was really having a lot of internet difficulties today, technology living in that future world, with volatility uncertainty complexity and ambiguity. But we got through it, and a great conversation was so pleased to have Jacob here.
My biggest takeaway, I'm going to go back. I mean, Jacob confirmed a lot of things that I had absolutely talked about. One is how this is so critical for every human being. But also, I think what I found interesting was out of the aid attributes.
These are things we talk about every week in different ways. So we talk about trust and integrity, and we talk about self-confidence. And we talk about developing the skills to be more adaptable. We talk about breaking out of that fixed mindset and moving toward a gross mindset.
And he put it into this formula all in all. And I think I don't think the vulnerabilities assign it. It's a symptom of a lot of the problems. It's the aggregate of not having all these things working together.
So I appreciate Jacob coming on and talking about that and confirming. We're on the right path. And we'll be hearing a lot more about that in the future. We want to thank all our listeners.
We want to thank Googleization Nation for being part of this. We want to thank great guests like Jacob for being on the show. And we will be back next week as we are every week with our live stream. If you don't get a chance to listen to us live, please go up and you can listen to us or watch us on YouTube or Apple or Spotify.
We thank you for pushing us into the top 100 on Apple and also being in the top one and a half percent of all podcasts. Until next week, don't let the shift hit your plans. Thanks for listening to Geeks, Geeksers and Googleization. This show was produced and edited by Hilton Productions.